I saw the new Michael Moore Documentary on our health care system, it’s been made widely available on the internet and I had heard a lot of buzz and decided to check it out.
The first thing to me was that this is an obvious ploy to make universal heathcare a factor in the next presidential election, Moore is pals with Hillary and Universal Healthcare was her pet project early in Clinton’s first administration.
While Moore’s movie is certainly less than objective you can’t argue the mans talent for making documentaries and some of his points certainly hit their mark while others are a far cry from truthful.
The way Moore presents it Americans would be better off going to Cuba for healthcare, that is simply not true and it should be noted that Cubans go to different hospitals than do the visitors to Cuba and while the healthcare in Cuba is free there have been far more accurate documentaries made about the Cuban Healthcare System and the atrocities therein.
More accurately portrayed are the insurance companies, who we all know, do everything possible to keep from paying a claim, but one thing that he didn’t get into is the discrepancy in pricing. Take me for example. I’m currently covered by a corporate policy that was obtained for me by a family member through her employer. The policy costs 210.00 per month and includes vision care and dental. When I called the same company asking for the same exact coverage my cost would have been 860.00 per month with no vision or dental care. Why is there such a huge discrepency in pricing? And don’t give me that “group policy” bullshit why can’t Americans be a group?
Thats where our government probably needs to look if we want to solve the healthcare crisis. I know I for one can think of precious few things that the government does well, why would I want to entrust them with the most important thing to me, my health?
I recently had major surgery and when I think about that and think that about our public school system, our postal service, the social security administration and the “war on drugs” it makes me cringe to think what kind of neurosurgeon I might have gotten. When I needed complicated neurosurgery I got the best of the best in Atlanta.
When I spoke with my Canadian friends, one of whom works in IT in Canadian hospitals I got a story that sounded very similar. He said one of the ongoing problems in Canada was people going to emergency rooms for problems that aren’t emergencies. They do it there because it’s convenient. We have the same problem here but for a different reason. Despite what Michael Moore would have you believe you cannot be turned away from a public hospital here in America, only a private one. Lot’s o people know this and take advantage of it knowing they will never have to pay, so when little Leroy gets the croup, mom takes him to the emergency room of the nearest public hospital where he gets treated for free for a non emergency.
Most Canadians are perfectly happy with their healthcare until it’s something that is life threatening and complicated, at that point most would prefer to see an American Doctor. But there’s a reason for that, it seems that lots of American Hospitals,both public and private lure away the best of Canada’s Doctors further diluting the quality of highly skilled specialists.
And maybe therein lies the solution to America’s healthcare crisis (yes I admit there is one) maybe the day to day care and pharmacueticals can be handled by a federal or state system and catastrophic healthcare insurance can cover the medical catastrophies. Of course we obviously can’t trust the insurance companies to play fair so I guess we again have to entrust the government to help us manage these beasts. Of course this would be the same government whom the insurance company lobbyists have in their pockets, bringing us managed health care and HMOs.
It would seem that it never ends, but it will end. When enough Americans get invloved and upset enough we eventually frighten our legislatures away from the money trees, look what we did with Bush’s immigration reform. In only a couple of monthswe turned him into a lame duck president, his priority domestic agenda was killed by his own party.
Another thing that Mr Moore would have you belive is that life expectancy of a nation somehow relates to the quality of it’s healthcare. Simply not true. The French live longer because they have better diets, ditto the Japanese, Canadians and most everyone else he mentioned. They don’t feed their kids McDonalds for every meal and they don’t keep them in the house playing video games. Yet.
Our problem is largely that as Americans we have become lazy, we have allowed our government to run rough shod over our liberties, we have allowed this petty wannabe dictator named George Bush Jr to strip away freedom that our forebearers paid for with their lives.
If we have a healthcare crisis in this country it is up to us to solve, and we will have to become active in that solution, simply waiting on our government to bestow it upon us is going to get us exactly what we would deserve.
And well, it just makes me sick.
